The Tasman Strings

Sunday Nights at Fitzroy Place

The Tasman Strings were formed in Hobart in 2010 by Elizabeth Anne Harris, concertmaster of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. She was twenty-nine, she had a baby son at home and a daughter not yet three, and she had been leading the orchestra's violins for three years. She wanted something the orchestra could not give her: a group small enough that she could shape every phrase of it herself, and a source of income that did not depend on the orchestra's budget.

She chose the other three players carefully and quickly. Amelia Rothschild, a violist who had joined the orchestra in 2008 and become her closest friend there, agreed at once. James O'Sullivan, a second violinist five years older than Elizabeth with a quiet, lyrical sound, took a week to think about it and then said yes. Thomas Andersen, a cellist and the oldest of the four, said he would try it for a year. He stayed for the rest of the quartet's life.

They rehearsed on Sunday nights in the soundproofed music room at 47 Fitzroy Place in Sandy Bay, the house of Elizabeth's father-in-law, Robert Harris. Robert had retired from the orchestra's first violins the previous year after forty seasons, and for twenty years he had run his own informal quartet from the same room. He sat in on most of their rehearsals that first year, in an armchair by the door, saying little and stopping them occasionally to ask who was listening to whom. Elizabeth found him infuriating and kept inviting him back.

Robert gave them more than his room. He lent them his library of quartet parts, decades of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert marked in his own pencil with bowings and breath marks and, here and there, a note to himself about a player long since retired. He made them play the slow movements of Haydn quartets until they were sick of them, on the grounds that nothing exposed a quartet's listening faster. He told them they were four good orchestral players pretending to be a quartet, and that it would take them five years to stop pretending. It took them about four.

The name was Elizabeth's. Amelia thought it sounded like a tourism brochure and said so. James did not care. Thomas pointed out that it would look good on a wedding invitation, which was where most of their money was going to come from, and that settled it. Their first public engagement was a lunchtime recital in a church in Battery Point in May 2010. Twenty-three people came, most of them related to one of the players.

Four Players

Elizabeth led. She chose the repertoire, booked the engagements, kept the diary and the accounts, and ran rehearsals briskly and from the front. She was precise, demanding and impatient, and she won most of the arguments. The quartet's sound in its early years was very much hers: clean, bright and tightly controlled, with a first violin that never let the others forget who was carrying the line.

James O'Sullivan was her opposite. He was born in Hobart in 1975, the son of a painter and a music teacher, and he played the second violin with a warmth and restraint that balanced Elizabeth's brilliance. He spoke little in rehearsals and was usually the last to pack up. He had a family of his own and a love of the bush, and he spent most of his weekends walking in the national parks with his violin in a pack on his back.

Amelia was the quartet's conscience. She was quieter than Elizabeth, more anxious and more honest, and she was the only one of the three who would tell Elizabeth, privately, when she had gone too far. Elizabeth listened to her more than she listened to almost anyone. Amelia suffered badly from nerves before performances, and in the early years Elizabeth, who did not, was not always patient with it.

Thomas Andersen was born in Hobart in 1970, the grandson of a Danish boatbuilder who had settled on the Derwent between the wars. He was large, slow-spoken and unflappable, and he held the quartet together in the way a cellist holds a quartet together, from underneath. When the others argued, Thomas waited until they had finished and then suggested they play the passage again. He was the one who smoothed things over afterwards, usually in the car park.

Their repertoire settled within a few years. For concerts they played Haydn and Beethoven, Schubert's Death and the Maiden, Dvořák's American quartet and, because Elizabeth loved it and the others came to, Shostakovich's eighth. For weddings they played arrangements, most of them made by Thomas at his kitchen table, of pop songs, film themes and the inevitable Pachelbel. James kept a private list of every couple who had asked for the Pachelbel, and by the end it ran to several hundred names.

The Waiting Year

The quartet nearly ended in its second year. In early 2011 James fell badly while walking in the south-west and smashed his left hand on a rock. He needed surgery and months of rehabilitation, and for a long time it was not clear that he would play again. He fell into a deep depression that year, and the others visited him in turn and did not talk about the quartet.

Elizabeth refused to replace him. Several people, including Robert Harris, told her she was being sentimental and that the quartet would lose its bookings and its momentum. She said that a quartet was four particular people or it was nothing, and she arranged what work she could for a trio and turned the rest away. The quartet lost most of a year's income. James played again in early 2012, beginning with a performance of the Beethoven violin concerto that he had worked towards throughout his rehabilitation, and The Tasman Strings gave their first concert as a quartet again a few weeks later.

The waiting year became part of the quartet's identity. Its members spoke about it rarely, but when they were asked, years later, why they had stayed together through arguments, injuries and two decades of poorly paid weddings, it was usually the first thing they mentioned.

Weddings and Funerals

The quartet lived, as most chamber groups do, on what its members called bread and butter. It played weddings in wineries in the Coal River Valley and on the Tasman Peninsula, funerals in churches across the south of the state, corporate dinners, gallery openings and the occasional private party for people who could afford a string quartet in their garden. Its fees were modest, its repertoire for these occasions was well worn, and it subsidised everything else the quartet wanted to do.

Money was the most common cause of argument. Elizabeth set the fees and took on more work than the others always wanted, and there were years when the quartet's weekends belonged to other people's weddings from October to April. Amelia was still repaying the loan that had taken her to London, and she needed the money more than she liked to admit. Thomas, who had a family in Kingston, did not care for the weddings and never complained about them.

The quartet also played for its own. In 2012 it played at Amelia's wedding to Nate Harrington in her mother's garden in upper Sandy Bay, with a violist borrowed from the orchestra sitting in Amelia's chair while she walked down the path on her father's arm. In 2016, when Amelia developed severe tendinitis and could not play for most of the year, Elizabeth again refused to replace a member permanently, and the quartet worked with guest violists until Amelia came back.

The closest the quartet came to breaking apart had nothing to do with injury. In 2019 Elizabeth was quietly approached to lead an established string quartet in Melbourne, a position that would have meant leaving the orchestra, her family's life in Hobart and The Tasman Strings. She told no one but Amelia. For several weeks she was distracted and short-tempered in rehearsals, and James and Thomas assumed something was wrong at home. She turned the offer down. Amelia did not tell the others until after Elizabeth's death.

Southern Echoes

The quartet's ambitions grew in the middle of the decade. It took chamber music into rural schools on the orchestra's outreach programmes, playing in school halls from Queenstown to St Helens, and it began to commission and play new work by Tasmanian composers. In 2017 it recorded Southern Echoes, an album of that work, which was broadcast nationally and remained the recording its members were proudest of as an ensemble.

The school tours were the part of the work that none of them had expected to love. The quartet would arrive at a school hall in the north-west or on the east coast after three hours in a hired van, set up in front of two hundred children sitting cross-legged on the floor, and play Haydn to them as though they were a concert audience. Thomas talked to them between movements about the cello, and was better at it than any of them.

In 2018 it collaborated with a group of Aboriginal musicians and singers on Songs of Country, a project brought about partly through the work of Amelia's brother, Samuel Rothschild, a historian of Aboriginal Tasmania. It took more than a year of conversations before anyone played a note, and the quartet learned, uncomfortably, how little it knew about the island it had named itself after. The performances, in Hobart and on the east coast, were the most significant the quartet ever gave.

The same year was crowded. In July the quartet played at the close of the seventh annual charity gala at the Museum of Old and New Art, where a newspaper report described it simply as the orchestra's string quartet. In September it played at the funeral of Amelia's father, Richard Rothschild, at St David's Cathedral. Amelia played with them, and got through it by not looking up.

The Garden and the Empty Hall

The pandemic stopped the quartet's work in 2020, as it stopped everyone's. Weddings were cancelled and funerals restricted, and the quartet lost almost all its income in a month. When the rules allowed, the four of them rehearsed outdoors in a garden in Sandy Bay, in coats and fingerless gloves through the autumn, partly to keep their hands in and partly because they missed each other.

Later that year they were given permission to record in the empty Federation Concert Hall. The pieces they recorded there over two days were released as Nightfall, a short album of slow movements and quiet music that sold better than anything they had made before, mostly to people who had been unable to go to a concert for months. Thomas said afterwards that it was the only time he had ever played in that hall and heard nothing at all from the seats.

The early 2020s brought the ordinary wear of a long partnership. The four of them were older, with children growing up and parents growing ill. Elizabeth's mother-in-law, Margaret Harris, died in 2021. Rehearsals moved from Fitzroy Place to Elizabeth's house in West Hobart, and then between all four houses, and the Sunday nights became fortnightly. The quartet went on playing, as it always had, mainly because none of them could imagine stopping.

Jeffries Manor

In November 2023 The Tasman Strings were engaged for the housewarming party of Jeffries Manor, an old estate outside Hobart that two siblings from the mainland, Jasper and Olivia Murphy, had bought and restored. The booking came through the event manager organising the evening. It was a well-paid engagement in a beautiful room, and the quartet played the early part of the night as the guests arrived in the grand ballroom.

When the speeches were over and the dancing began, a jazz trio took over, and the quartet packed up and drove back to Hobart before the party was finished. They heard afterwards that the lights had failed during the evening and that some of the guests had been frightened, and none of them gave it much thought. It was the last major engagement the four of them played together.

The Empty Chair

On 15 March 2024 Elizabeth Harris was killed in a car accident on the Midland Highway north of Kempton, driving home from an afternoon masterclass and recital in Launceston. She was forty-three. It was Amelia's forty-first birthday. That evening Daniel Harris telephoned Thomas, and Thomas made the other calls, first to James and then to Amelia, who was at her birthday dinner at her mother's house in Sandy Bay.

At Elizabeth's funeral at St David's Cathedral on 26 March, James, Amelia and Thomas played with the first violin's chair beside them left empty. The Tasman Strings did not play again for the rest of the year. Amelia helped the orchestra establish the Chen-Harris Young Strings Fellowship in Elizabeth's name, and James and Thomas taught and played in the orchestra and avoided each other's eyes in rehearsals.

They played together again in July 2025, at the funeral of Robert Harris at St David's Cathedral, with the orchestra's associate concertmaster, Hannah Varga, as their first violinist. Hannah was thirty-six, Hungarian-born and trained in Budapest and Melbourne, and she had been filling the concertmaster's chair since Elizabeth's death. She had known Elizabeth for twelve years and did not try to play like her.

Three and a Guest

After Robert's funeral, the quartet began to play again, occasionally, with Hannah Varga as its guest first violinist. It took a few weddings, a recital in the Conservatorium and a handful of school concerts, far fewer than in its busiest years. The three surviving members agreed, without ever quite saying it aloud, that they would not look for a permanent replacement, and Hannah, who understood, never asked to be one.

In early 2026, after Daniel Harris moved back into the house at Fitzroy Place, the quartet began rehearsing again in Robert's old music room, which had become Daniel's teaching room. The armchair by the door was still there. Daniel sat in it for the first rehearsal and left after ten minutes. The quartet played Haydn, the way Robert had made them, and nobody said anything about it.

The quartet also took on a quieter role in 2026. Each term it invited the young players of the Chen-Harris fellowship to Fitzroy Place to read through quartets with them, one fellow at a time in the first violin's chair, with Hannah Varga coaching from the side. It was the kind of work Elizabeth had always said she would do one day when she had the time. The three players did it on Sunday nights, which was when the quartet had always rehearsed.

By 2026 The Tasman Strings had been playing in Hobart for sixteen years. Amelia Harrington was principal viola of the orchestra, James O'Sullivan was teaching more than he played, and Thomas Andersen, at fifty-six, had begun to talk about retiring. The quartet's diary was thin, its bookings were managed by Amelia, and its programmes were drawn mostly from the music Elizabeth had chosen. It still billed itself, on the rare occasions it billed itself at all, as The Tasman Strings.